martes, 11 de febrero de 2014

Interactions
between art, architecture and science in the age of biotechnology

Lecture (Universitat de
Barcelona, Barcelona, 11th May 2012) and text of Alberto T. Estévez, “Interactions between art,
architecture and science in the age of biotechnology”, in VV.AA., Artistic
innovations and new media, conservation, networks and techno-science,
Barcelona: AASD Research Group, Universitat de Barcelona, 2014, pp. 133-140 and
pp. 267-273 (http://www.artyarqdigital.com).

One example of the evolution
of contemporary art from abstraction to bioart would be the symbolic, highly
ironic step that leads from Malevich’s 1918 painting White Square on White to
my own fleshly Soft Square on Soft (2012), created as an explicit manifesto
to illustrate the point at which we now find ourselves (in Spanish it is also
an ironic pun: blanco=white / blando=soft).

The social impact of art,
architecture and sciences that use biotechnology – that work with living beings
– is so strong that the issue of their ethical implications comes to the fore.
Especially now that science has reached a stage where we can work at an
intramolecular, genetic level: a step that casts shadows and doubts on the
matter due to the familiar subjective reservations that usually come up in
relation to anything new. Nonetheless, from an objective point of view, there
is no ethical difference between acting on what we could call “the surface of
things” and acting at the intramolecular level. There are differences because
the scales are different, but there is no break in the ethical continuum
between the two. There is no inherent ethical distinction between an artist who
uses a bulldozer, as in Land Art for example, and a shovel, a teaspoon, or a
pipette as in bioart and genetic art. And where we say artist, we could just
also say architect, scientist, engineer, chef even, or any other human actor.

Once we accept the organic,
fluid configuration of nature, which goes from the outside to the molecular
interior of what we call “natural” objects, there is, ethically speaking, not
much difference between a human action that produces a Japanese bonsai and one
that produces a fluorescent rabbit. Does one of these beings suffer more than
the other? Bonsais are socially accepted and even admired, even though they
only come into being as a result of constant, recurring cuts to tormented
living matter, while a fluorescent rabbit is no less happy than a black one or
a white one.

In our work as researchers
in the Genetic Architectures group, and in our practice as architects
developing genetic architecture plans and designs, we have always been
concerned with resolving the ethical implications as well as the scientific
aspects of our projects. For this reason, our team includes philosophers who
deal with bioethical maters, and geneticists who work for us. In fact, we
subtly draw attention to the ethical undercurrent – to the need for planetary
sustainability that justifies our work – by always hyphenating the words
“gen-etics” (and “gen-éticas” in Spanish, with “éticas” meaning “ethics”) on the
covers of our publications.

Human action upon living
beings is inevitable, ongoing and necessary, and even though it could be said
to have a devastating effect, it must be ethically exonerated to a large
extent. In a sense, human beings have, and must have, a “licence to kill”. For
example, a human body has 1013of its own cells and 1014microorganisms.
In other words, our body hosts 10 non-human beings for each human cell, so
every time we take a shower, wash or clean, countless living beings die as a
result of our consciously annihilating actions. Even so, the cultural and
social contract insists that we continue to wash ourselves, and we don’t allow
bugs in our houses. Even though each and every one of those living beings is,
in itself, a biological marvel that cannot be reproduced by humans.

On the other hand, the most
extreme of the series of actions that includes manipulating, wounding, and
killing a living being, would certainly be eating it. Because by eating
something we don’t simply killing it, we make it disappear completely into our
own cells. Of course, eating living beings is endorsed by a basic need, given
that, at least for the time being, we can’t eat rocks. But in spite of it being
the most extreme action, nobody gets thrown in jail for eating a chicken
sandwich. There is a natural, tacit and universal pact. Just as there is a
natural, tacit and universal pact to punish anybody who murders and eats a
human being. This means that humans are the only “protected” beings. If we eat
a lettuce, we won’t go to jail. If we eat, stab, kidnap a person, we will. We only
respect the integrity and independence of human beings, not of all other
beings. As this applies to even the most extreme action – eating –, it
automatically follows that any other less drastic action is permissible.

We are obviously talking in
generically, without entering into the case of “endangered species”, for
example, which introduce the factor of scarcity, and thus add the value of
biodiversity that human beings want to preserve. The importance that we place
on endangered species actually arises from their genetic value, the desire to
safeguard every single one of the groupings of genes that “work” autonomously.
That entail life. Similarly, we take for granted the exception of harming
non-human living means for pleasure. Society’s rejection of this simply
reflects human dignity, which would be weakened by the
desire to make an animal suffer for the sake of seeing that suffering.

If you leave a
potato in a kitchen drawer, it will eventually start to sprout stems, leaves,
flowers… What is more “radical”: To cut a potato? To fry it, burn it alive in
oil? To eat it and erase its identity in order to fuel our own cells? Does the
potato feel honoured by this death? Resigned to it? Or is it all simply the
path that nature forces us along? All human actions upon any natural being are
natural.

But of course, is
we act upon genetic material we must accept our responsibility as illustrated
by the “domino effect” that takes place in time and space, and that has been
explained using the example of a butterfly. In spatial terms, there is the
“butterfly effect”, where the beating of a butterfly’s wings in China is said
to be able to trigger a storm in Spain. And in terms of time, in A Sound
of Thunder (1) Ray Bradbury wrote a dramatic story about a
prehistoric butterfly which was accidentally killed by a traveller from the
future – a historical development unforeseen by evolution – resulting in life
being slightly different millions of years later than if that butterfly had not
been killed. When I presented this article in public, nobody imagined that it
was the last time that someone was speaking about him at a university event, as
he died barely 25 days later.

Precisely as this science
fiction story shows, it is not just our actions on genetic material but any of
our actions at all – whether or not we eat a particular potato– that will have
a corresponding domino effect millions of years later. But all of them are part
of nature.

Moving on to other questions
that need to be answered in order for things to fall into place: Can the result
of a plant graft be considered art? If the graft was the work of Eduardo Kac,
it would be declared art with great fanfare. But if it was the work of an
anonymous farmer, with a different specific intention, nobody would be
particularly interested in it. Even if the process and the result were
identical. Though a graft is not yet an intramolecular action, but simply a
“surface” action.

So when Kac claims to be
some kind of God-Creator, he oversteps the definitions that human beings have
agreed on. And this transgression simply provokes more resentment among
non-specialists: this muddying of the waters does not do any favours to
science, which is exploring the enormous potential of genetics for resolving
the serious, urgent problems of humanity. This exploration is in line with the
key objectives of genetics applied to architecture as explored by the Genetic
Architects research group, such as the creation of living beings that include
bioluminescent and bioheat qualities that can be useful in domestic and urban
spheres. And the synthesis of elements that can be genetically processed to
favour the cleaner, more efficient and affordable construction of habitats.

For example, the accounts
that Kac likes to offer in public, such as the following excerpt from an
interview, do more harm than good:

“it took – seven years! – of
work on the Edunia petunia before I managed to introduce my own DNA into it.
(...) I put my DNA into its ‘veins’, and now it is producing my human
proteins. The green phosphorescent rabbit and the “plantimal” aren’t nature… I
created them! (...) With Alba (2000) and the plantimal Edunia (2003),
I also relieve God of his status as a creator-myth and turn him into a lab
worker, a technician working in a transgenic workshop.

I don’t copy reality: I
create it” (2)

Few things can have a
greater negative effect than somebody with a strong media presence who speaks
without rigour, sowing terminological and ideological confusion. Also, such an
exaggeratedly pretentious attitude is likely to create a bad impression, to give
Kac a bad name as an individual, and also drag the work into disrepute. Which
is a pity, because it casts the shadow of suspicion on anybody who follows a
similar path. But going back to what he says:

- It is not true that he
spent seven years on the work, simply that it took seven years for it to
happen.

- It is not true that he
inserted his DNA into the plant, it was more like having a “microbrick”
inserted into an enormous set of many thousands of “microbricks.” A tiny piece
that would be insignificant in mathematical terms. And in any case, this
“microbrick” is identical to the ones that we all have, and is not in any sense
specifically or uniquely “his”.

- It is not true that the
resulting plant produces “his” human proteins. Rather, it produces human
proteins that are chemically identical to those of any human being.

- It is not true that by
inserting a gene taken from an animal into a plant, it becomes a “plantimal”.
Just as the fact that a virus can manage to mutate the DNA of some of our cells,
resulting in a tumour, does not make us a “humanirus”.

- It is not true that the
rabbit and the plant in question “are not nature”.

- It is not true that he
created this rabbit and this plant.

- It is not true that he
relieves God of his status as a creator-myth and turns him into a lab worker, a
technician in a transgenic workshop, because even the most inexperienced
student of theology knows that God the creator is defined as he who “creates
from nothingness”. By consensus on the terminology or by faith: the divine
being creates from nothingness, and human beings can only create from
pre-existing elements. And the “creation” – in inverted commas – of new beings
by means of genetic manipulation is ultimately nothing but “bricklaying”. It
involves simply repositioning the “microbricks”, repositioning existing genes,
and has nothing to do with divine creation or with something that is not
natural and does not belong to nature, either before, during or after said
manipulation.

- It is not true that he “creates
reality”, because the gene that he integrates into an enormous pre-existing
genetic structure also existed earlier. So he doesn’t even create a single
gene, he simply changes its position. He is not really a creator at all. At
most he is a simple archivist, who has arranges for some molecules to be taken
out of one position and placed in another. He hasn’t even created, or
discovered, or invented, the process that those molecules activate. A scientist
has simply identified the gene responsible for the proteins required, the gene
has then been isolated, and repositioned in a plant. This is all very prosaic
and nothing like the true creation of a living being.

Basically, by inserting a
gene from another being into the rabbit and the plant, they did not cease to be
“natural”; they did not cease to be nature. This gene “repositioning” has been
carried out anonymously by the pharmaceutical and agricultural food industries
since long before Kac’s projects, with more complexity and implications, and on
a large scale. Just as our own research into a type of bioluminescence that can
be efficient at the domestic and urban scale leads us to work with situations
in which genetic science puts animal genes into plants, without this being
considered extraordinary and worth announcing with such media fanfare.

Eight great untruths,
published far and wide and read by thousands of people, in barely half a dozen
sentences: it’s very close to quackery, to creating a blinding confusion, to a
total lack of ethics… At least this example has allowed us to explain things
more clearly in this text, to try and shed light on the issues and put them in
their proper place, even though only a few dozen people will read it.

The fact is, that whenever
somebody thinks up a new imaginary creature for a book or a film, it is easy to
see the traces of their inspiration. But it is highly unlikely that if they had
never seen anything similar to an octopus or a barnacle, for example, they
would ever have been able to imagine one.

The limitation of the human
creation comes from their inability to create from nothing. The human being, when
challenged to create a new creature, he necessarily is based on pre-existing images.
This is the reality of human creations versus natural realities.

Human beings have gradually
discovered scientific explanations for rain, rainbows and eclipses, for
example, leading to a demystification of natural phenomena. Now we continue to
try and resolve the mystery of life. Nobody has been able to discover why the
arrangement of a few simple molecules in a certain order makes them “work” –
legs grow, they walk, eat and reproduce. And the wiser and more specialised a
geneticist is, the more likely he is to answer “we don’t know, we don’t know,
we don’t know,” to the questions that are put to him.

However, this emergent
nature of life is what mankind has to take advantage of, and this is why we are
interested in investigating how genetics can be applied to architecture. The
idea is to take advantage of nature’s capacity for self-organisation, growth,
and reproducibility. So we look for plants that emit light or heat, that will
help find the energy saving mechanisms that our world needs, that will be
usable as construction materials and even as entire habitats. We can begin to imagine,
in a not so distant reality, “streetlights”, “heaters”, and even entire houses
that grow on their own.

Given that this research
also focuses on the use of genetics, we can also consider possible
architectural uses at the level at which undefined cellular masses emerge and
self-organise, as the first structural step. We can study this with a scanning
electron microscope, which has an extremely high resolution that allows us to
see images magnified thousands of times. This opens up a little-known dimension
of reality, which, depending on how the images are read or interpreted, can
lead to a fascinating level of surreality. As a result of research carried out
in this framework, it was possible to create strange, surprising new images
that were publicly shown in two exhibitions and a book (3): a selection of
“altered” photographs of natural structures at their most Genesis-like and
primitive level. Artistic works and architectural plans based on
biotechnological work that have an enigmatic evocative power.

Part of this power comes
from the “objective beauty” that Gaudi talked about: the beauty of nature. It
is certainly true that artists and architects from Alberti to Le Corbusier,
have pursued the myth of the existence of the objective proportions that should
guide the underlying structures of art and architecture. A proportion that can
be instinctively seen by those who have “a compass in their eyes”, a natural
gift that echoes Alberti’s “concinnitas”, without the need for mathematical
calculations, exceptional talents from Michelangelo to Gaudi. Even though Gaudi
created the first architectural “computer”, which objectively and automatically
ordered or “computed” architectural forms based on the weights that had to be
borne by the structures, hanging from ropes in the space, subject to the force
of gravity.

What neither Alberti, Le
Corbusier, Michelangelo, nor Gaudi knew, is that, in nature, this “objective
beauty” that can be sensed in a certain harmonious resonance between each
fragment and the overall whole, is due to the fact that the same DNA, the same
morphological laws, are contained in each and every cell: be they in a nail, a
tooth, a cheek, a petal, a leaf or a stem. Obviously, different weather
conditions, physical and mental illnesses, nutritional factors and innumerable
coincidences and external interactions can introduce “ugliness” into this
“objective beauty”, which would be optimal at the genesis or original starting
point. This is why living beings that are less “damaged” by time – babies,
puppies –, appear to have more concinnitas or “grace”. We seem to be
able to see their DNA more clearly, without the veils that build up over time.

This suggests that if we
were to create art and architecture based on a single “DNA”, following a
particular set of morphological laws to govern each fragment, which would in
turn be harmoniously integrated into the whole, then our work would be endowed
with the “objective beauty” of nature. And this is easily done when the “DNA”
in question is digital, when every line is drawn by the mathematical equations
that make up the graphic software being used. This is how having “a compass in
the eye” is democratised: and it is the biodigital research that the Genetic
Architectures research group carries out, in a quest for a communal enjoyment
of beauty.

This process was illustrated
at the Biodigital Architecture “installation-pavilion” at the eme3
festival, for example, in an attempt to explain the obsolescence of techniques
of the past, and to implement the bio-digital manifesto “no models, no moulds”:
the quest to produce real architecture directly at a scale of 1:1, using CAD-CAM
technology. The project was based on an analysis of radiolarian structures and
pollen applied to the digital development of architecture, using a scanning
electron microscope. It was thus in keeping with the idea of “bio-learning”,
which offers the benefits of the structural, formal and processual efficiency
that we can learn from nature.

“Yes, research into
biodigital architecture, research into the architectural application of
cutting-edge biological and digital techniques, with the benefits that come
from the inclusion of genetics (efficiency, economy, renewable use,
self-replication, etc.), is crucial, relevant and even urgent
right now, before it becomes too late for a planet that has reached the limits
of its sustainability.” (4)